Endless Space

It's obvious that you played an enormous amount of MOO2 and it shows. I understand what you've tried to do. There are things that need to be fixed before I go back to this. To be honest, for $30, I was expecting a much more solid experience. Gal Civ 2 and even Star Ruler are really preferable by comparison, as is Distant Stars (although too daunting). Here are a few items:

(1) Time Between Moves -- there's no way on an i7 with 8gb of memory that I need to wait 5 - 10 seconds per move. I don't know if the delay is intentional or you need to optimize, but at higher levels it becomes very annoying.(2) Stellar Background & Zoom Out -- The stellar background is pretty, but distracts from the map. Further, noise confuses real star systems with sparkle. There's no reason I should be able to zoom out beyond the visible borders of the galaxy. (3) Interface - "Mushy" describes it best. Sometimes I have to click buttons twice to get them to acknowledge, especially on later levels.(4) Updates / Galactopedia / Discoveries -- Yeah, I discovered "Blue Cap" -- but what is it and why do I care? Is there any history? If so, it certainly doesn't pop up much.(5) List of discovered but uncolonized planets -- come on -- on a medium or large galaxy this is essential. MOO2 had it. You need it.(6) AI, especially path finding. I set a ship to explore and when it hits a corner it informs me that "The entire galaxy has been explored." Nope(7) Sometimes shops follow superstrings, sometimes they just cut corners. I'm sure there's some explanation for when and why, but it beats me.

*****(7) QC -- after an 8 hour game, I decided to break an alliance and attack -- I had a large fleet, plenty of planets and a large ally. "You are the Loser -- $Enemy has defeated you. $YourEmpire has been defeated. Do you want to continue to play." WHAT???!?!?!?!?!?

Nice try, but there are some serious patches you need to get out here.

1: The time between turns varies a lot, and is usually slowed down when fleets are moving around. It's not necessarily processing-time. It's fleets visually moving around as the AI finishes its turn. The game might benefit from an instant AI moves option. I think they skipped that in favor of programming the game for multiplayer. Though MP does have some trouble of its own.

2: I don't see how zooming out of galaxy bounds is harmful. Doesn't seem worth complaining about if you ask me. As for the background being distracting, it never has been to me. You might just be too accustomed to cleaner backgrounds.

3: True, the interface is somewhat unresponsive sometimes. I mostly just deal with it though. They might fix that, since it's a known problem.

4: Mouse over the resource's icon. The tooltip will tell you gameplay-wise effects aswell as a short historical description.

6: It can't find a route to any undiscovered star from where it is. Remember that your ships can't enter systems belonging to other empires (unless it's just an outpost and has no borders), unless you're at war or have an open border treaty. You get a one-time exception when you're just discovering the system.

7: They choose whichever pathway takes them to the destination soonest, and leaves them the most movement points remaining once they arrive. This will vary depending on technology, specifically which ship movement is best researched at the moment between warp drive and string drive.

As for wormholes, travel across them is instant, but consumes all remaining movement points. As movement-related tech advances, ships begin to avoid wormholes unless they only have a small bit of movement left for the turn.

8: I think this is a known glitch, which the devs are surely working on. You might prevent it by disabling some victory conditions. Not sure which, but I've never gotten this problem playing with only domination/science/expansion conditions on.

I think my frustration is that this feels more like late stage beta, than a finished product. The crash at the end, after an 8 hour game was intensely frustrating.

I've been playing games long enough to realize that it's a moving target, but honestly, some of the UI/UX stuff just seems as if it has not been reasonably addressed and for the crash at the end (which is apparently a known glitch), it makes me wonder about QC.

There are so few decent 4X space games out there and this seemed to be very much inspired by (spiritual successor to) MOO2, one of my all-time favorite games, that I think I could forgive the UI/UX issues if QC was there, or the QC issues if UI/UX was there.

I'll try a few more times, but I may just have to crack open DW and try to bang my head against that for a while.

Thanks for the detailed response.

Regards,

-db

PS It would be very very very nice if there was more of a narrative arc. Am I missing that?

Did you get a crash at the end? Like crezeh mentioned above, this seems to be the "known issue" caused by some localisation missing (it is due to the fact that we started reworking on those end game messages, and in the meantime, we released a Halloween update, slightly breaking the localisation files). Add-On 2, due next week, should solve that.

I don't have any issue with turn time either. I would like to see an option for instant AI moves though. The only real issues I see atm are:

1) Sorted Lists: For the planets there should be multiple sort criteria, like a primary, secondary, etc. As it is now the list resorts any time a planet needs resorting due to a change while on the list screen. Unfortunately, ALL the planets seem to resort. This is most noticeable when working on the production queue through the planet list screen. I often sort by production to add new techs to produce on planets that are currently using the I resource to produce dust. If you change the production of a planet it gets resorted, but so does the rest of the planets that are also changing I to D. It makes it hard to keep track of some changes, especially when trying to keep track of which planets have max pop, or other things, while changing production. Also, being able to sort the currently built improvements list, or the available to build improvements, by various criteria (build time, dust cost after build, etc.) would be very nice.

2) Fleets on guard duty: Why don't these auto-engage when enemy fleets come into the system they are supposed to be protecting? I've had a few times where systems on the out edge of my territory ended up being blockaded for quite a few turns simply because I hadn't looked at that area and the fleet that was there for protection (WITH the "guard" option selected) didn't engage. You have to manually attack the enemy fleet every time. What is the guard option there for then?

3) No terraforming for Gas Giants or Asteroids: Not really a bug or issue, just something that I think would be cool to add. :) Sure, it could be late game tech, and take a butt-ton or industry, but ya. :)

4) Every so often, it's pretty rare and has only happened twice in about, or 270 turns of a game, but for some reason one of my planets name and "ring" display that you get when you hover over it appear on a completely unrelated planet. Usually it's one that's not even inhabited by any race. Reloading fixes it, however turn changes don't seem to.

As for the UI this has to be one of the slickest, most intuitive UIs for the amount of information you have available that I've seen in a game like this. I definitely give the developers kudos in this department. Sure, there are some rough spots (dealing with fleets could use some work, at least through the fleet screen) but all in all a good job. The only gameplay I don't like is the ship combat, but at least yall tried something new and innovative. It was interesting, and it works, but it's not really fun or rewarding in the long term, especially given the odd way that the auto-resolve seems to work.

The jury is still out for me on this game. I loved MOO2 and even Ascendancy had its charm and innovation (lots can be learned from that design) and am hopeful that ES will eventually hit the mark. There are two major detractions that make this game nearly unplayable for me. I say nearly because Ithere are many aspects I like about ES, so I may try hitting my head against it again to see if there's something I missed.

1) The unpredictable (random?) real time attacks the AI initiates during my turn and happen to coincide when I'm looking at a screen other than the galactic one. This silly arrangement doesn't allow me to choose the 'manual' option for the battle! So I found myself, in paranoid fashion, not staying on another screen for more than a few seconds when I thought such a battle imminent. This is bad UI behavior and really needs to be rethought. At least give me the global ability to turn off the attack timer and have the screen stay up until I select the mode. I don't want this type of real time pre-combat snippet in a 4x *strategy* game and has no place in ES. Too many times when I've finished selecting production or a tech to research and went back to the galaxy screen only to be informed, after the fact, of battles where I won or lost without any opportunity to participate.

2) Multiple fleets in a system - this aspect feels half-baked to me. Yes, there are bugs with the UI (moving ships from one fleet to another when it won't let you do it on the fleet screen, but does on the more awkward galaxy screen, and the UI missing click events frequently, etc,) but... the big problem is the interaction of multiple friendly fleets with enemy fleets. I found no way to protect a fleet of, say invasion ships or colony ships with one more suitable for combat. The enemy just seems to be able to fly in and will randomly attack one of the fleets. This high-variance approach discourages interesting strategies in exchange for a very unsatisfying die roll. Side note: You should consider a way to work in ship designs that cost zero command points. Yes, this has lots of implications so it needs to be thoroughly thought out.

Less critical (at least in terms of immediately discouraging me to replay the game) but need to be addressed:

3) I wholeheartedly agree with a previous comment on needing a screen to examine explored and uncolonized planets. I like large maps and it's pretty tedious delving here.

4) I like complex strategies and thus, lots of ship varieties. The paltry limit of ship designs is a cheapo UI limitation that's, well, cheapo. Please do something here.

5) Using dust to upgrade ships is arbitrarily simplistic. In the game, it costs exactly the same to upgrade a ship of the original design to one of 20 versions later as it does for going from version 19 to 20. Assuming I don't have unlimited dust, that encourages me into an awkward design corner: First find (that is a pain by itself) all of the oldest ships and upgrade those first. Having to navigate a convoluted process to optimize fleet power in this way is a sign of suboptimal UI design. Please fix this. It should cost proportionately less to upgrade newer designs, or better yet, allow for docked ships to be retrofitted automatically (no need to allocate production) by a new building (you get to add another tech to the research tree!).

I hope that this game can achieve (and perhaps exceed) the same level of entertainment and replayability as something like MOO2. I believe the potential is there.

PS The color scheme of population (greyed-out pale blue) vs potential population (bright white) is a perversely strange UI choice. Sure, I've now learned to live with it, but really, what were you thinking? I showed this to two other people and we all thought it's exactly counter-intuitive. As it's probably too confusing to reverse this now, maybe for the sake of new players I'd suggest for you to brighten up the blue and severely tone down the white.